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Article:		The State of Home-Brew PVRs on Linux
Subject:		TiVo vs DVR
Date:		2003-11-17 18:06:04
From:		anonymous2

TiVo is nice for time-shifting your TV watching, but a lot of folks alk about hacking it for the purpose of archiving the video -- essentially a digital video recorder. The problem, as I see it, is that all TiVo-ish systems store the video in compressed form for the sake of maximizing storage. These codecs are usually MPEG 1 or 2, both of which are lossy compressors. If you want to edit the video -- to remove commercials and such -- you must first uncompress. Then when you recompress, you suffer quality loss, sometimes VERY noticable. I have a different setup. I have a Formac Studio TVR (analog to digital video converter with TV tuner) and several BIG hard drives. I record what I want, process it with Final Cut Express and iDVD, and there it is. Granted, I am not doing tens of hours of video per week, but I manage a couple of hours without difficulty.

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Editing with Mythtv
2003-11-19 00:15:50 anonymous2 [View]

When you edit shows in Mythtv without transcoding (coding to another video format) only the frames at the cut point will be reencoded. All other frames only get copied, so no quality loss here.